By Charlie van Gelderen ZIONISM as a movement was born in the nineteenth century. It aimed to bring the Jews back to Palestine and to establish a mono-cultural Jewish state.
From the start its principal leaders recognised that this could achieved al the expense of the native Palestinian population, Such views have been repeated ever since. As recently as 1967 the director of the Department of Colonisation of the Jewish Agency for Israel stated:
"The only possible solution lies in creating Palestine, orar Western Palestine, without Arabs...and there is no other way to do this than to transfer all the Arabs to neighbouring countries, to move all of them out of here. We should not leave a single tribe, and those transferred should be sent to Syria and Iraq.
From the beginning the Palestinans resisted Zionist colonisation. TeNAnCC WAs CADresseO IR ARTEsSenI of Jewish settlements by who had been run off their land, by the uprisings of 1920/21, and in great strikes Led by Zionist militias.
only be Zionism nas fluential region.
and the Tsar of Russia. least were able to well outside the borders and to Bank, and Sinai.
This the peasants Arab revolution.
These reached a climax month general strike in 1936 followed by a generalised revolt in the countryside, which was crushed by British forces aidBut Zionism received the active support of British imperialism, which saw in it a safeguard for its oil interests in the Middle East and its route to India.
always allied itself with what it considered to be the most inimperialist powers in the Thus Theodor Herzl, its founding father, sought the support of the Ottoman sultans, the German Kaiser The six-day war in 1967 came as a boon to the Zionist expansionists. With their vastly superior military might they establish their superiority of the statelet created by the United Nations in 1948, occupy the whole of the West the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights imperialist dagger in the Arab East and the chief agent of imperialism in containing the The ideological justification for Zionism was always that it would put an end to anti-semitism. In fact it has done nothing of the kind. Modern day antisemitism, like other forms of racism, is a product of the decaying capitalist system just as the anti-Jewish pogroms of the Middle Ages were the product of a dying feudalism.
Zionism has generated anti-Jewish racism where it barely existed before -in the Moslem countries in the Middle East. Because /Zionism represents the whole of world Jewry, every act of Zionist aggression against the Arabs leads to reprisals gainst Jews in the neighbouring Arab states Zionists insist should resist this insidious propaganda Anti-semitism, like all other forms of racism, serves the ruling class by causing divisions inside the working class.
Jewish revolutionary should support the struggle for a free Palestine, free from imperialism and its Zionist Arab. Jew and Christian together building a socialist Palestine as part of a Socialist Federation of the Arab East. There is no other road to peace in the Arab East.
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